by Ed West
Lothian formed part of the “Old North,” Hen Ogledd, a series of British kingdoms in what is now northern England and southern Scotland, among them Strathclyde, Rheged, and Gododdin, but which were conquered by the Anglian kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia. The kings of Northumbria had then established their strongholds at Bebbanburg*—later Bamburgh—Castle on the North Sea coast, an old fortress that had been used by Celtic warlords following the chaos of Rome’s collapse. The Angles had taken the stronghold late in the sixth century, pushing the Britons further west during a centuries-long period of conflict.
In Westeros, the Andals did not conquer the North and likewise the Angles did not colonize all of England, since the hills made occupation harder in the more remote regions. Indeed, a large-scale DNA study published in 2015 showed that the Angles had not penetrated into the mountainous parts of Northumbria. The samples were taken from English people with four grandparents from one area and confirmed that, while Anglo-Saxon colonization had been heavy around the low-lying eastern part of Yorkshire, people in the mountainous Pennines carried mostly indigenous British genetic markers.7
And so, the first men and the old ways hung on in the less accessible regions. Until as late as the twentieth century farmers in the uplands of the West Riding of Yorkshire used a counting method called Yan Tan Tethera, which dated back to ancient pre-English languages once spoken there. Their word for four, peddero, is related to the Welsh pedwar, while dix, ten, is cognate with the Welsh deg. And while it took the Andals another thousand years to take the Iron Islands, much of England was only conquered by the Angles and Saxons much later; Cumbria and Devon, in the very far north and southwest respectively, held out until the ninth century, and not surprisingly the 2015 study showed the people in those parts to be genetically distinct from the rest of the English (beyond Devon, in the county of Cornwall, there was yet another, altogether different, set of genetic markers). Overall, the Anglo-Saxon contribution to the English genome is between 10-40 percent, which suggests a large invasion which, nonetheless, did not wipe out the natives.8
Arthur’s Saxon enemies, Cerdic and his Cynric, are semi-historic but their British names hint at a native aristocracy who adopted Saxon identities or were at the very least mixed. Their kingdom, Wessex, had been formed along the Thames Valley, close to the Uffington White Horse, a figure drawn on the side of a hill in Berkshire and dating back to at least 800BC, before the arrival of the Celts. Nearby is Dragon Hill, a natural chalk slope with a flat surface where no grass would grow; according to local belief this was because dragon’s blood had been spilled there. Later it became the spot where St George supposedly slew the beast; almost certainly it was the site for Iron Age rituals of some sort, probably involving something horrific. It was from these picturesque gently rolling hills and the prize farmland around the Thames that the fuure kings of England would emerge.
And yet, despite the absence of evidence for a real Arthur, the myth had a huge impact on medieval ideas of chivalry, romance, and heroism, and those of Westeros, even if in Martin’s world it is a cynical idea turned on its head.
WINTERFYLLEĐ
This was a land of myth and monsters, as told in the eighth century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf about a hero pledged to kill the giant Grendel. Beowulf is set in Scandinavia, from where the Angles’ ancestors had come, but it took its current form in the mid-eighth century and most likely was written down in Northumbria.9 In many ways it is the archetypal story of a man overcoming a monster, one of the Seven Basic Plots, along with the Greek myth of Perseus, Dracula, and Jaws. But it is also a sort of lament for a disappearing past and a sad relection that, when all is done, glory is all for nothing.
This was a warrior society and men, even young children, were buried with their swords and shields, weapons which carried the mana, aura of those killed in battle. Although a ferocious fighter who battled a dragon, Beowulf was also “the gentlest of men, kindest and dearest to his people, and most eager for fame,” but ultimately that fame is fleeting.
In the 1920s, J.R.R. Tolkien, having survived the Somme and horrified with much of what modernity could do, was a professor at Oxford where he was writing a new translation of Beowulf. As the world crept toward another catastrophic war, he penned his series of fantasy stories that in turn did much to influence Martin.10 The Hobbit, written in 1937 soon after Tolkien’s famous series of lectures on Beowulf, features a climatic battle against a dragon, while both Tolkien and Martin also drew on the Arthurian tradition. As one comparison of the two epics points out, fantasy writers have long “drawn upon Arthurian lore” from two medieval tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. “Whether mirroring, amplifying or spinning off from these earlier works, the great fantasy sagas created by Tolkien and Martin have a family resemblance because they’ve inherited the same narrative DNA.”11 Both modern epics tell of a threat of evil coming from outside; for Tolkien it came from the east and for Martin from the north.
Both Tolkien’s and Martin’s creations feature varging, or skinchanging, from the old English word wearh, meaning outlaw or man, and the Old Norse term vargr, meaning wolf. In Middle Earth, wargs are monstrous wolves ridden by orcs, while in Westeros wolves are on the side of men against the monsters. Similarly with wights; when the Christian gospel was brought to the northern people, an epic poem called the Heliand explained the Bible in terms Germanic people could understand, and so the biblical “Lead us not into temptation” became “Do not let foul wights seduce us to their will.” Wiht, the old English word, simply meant any living creature, although in fantasy it came to mean in particular the undead or other similarly sinister beings.
Although epics celebrate the heroic virtues and that is what future generations remember, most Angles were not warriors, but farmers, eking out a tough living growing barley and other crops. After harvest time the food would be stored during the month of October, which the Anglo-Saxons called Winterfylleð, so called because it marked the first full moon of winter.12 In other words, Winter is Coming. After that came Blopmonap, or Blood-month, when the animals were slaughtered for winter; this was followed by Ærra Gēola, “Before Yule,” Yule being the midwinter pagan festival.
Like the Andals, the Angles were polytheists, although little is known of their religion except the gods Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Frigg, who left their names in days of the week. The Angles most likely believed in a variation of the Nordic Valhalla, an afterlife in which warriors would feast, fight, and fornicate in a drunken haze.
However, as in Westeros, the Angles were soon faced with a new and mysterious faith emerging from the east, which claimed there was just one god. As in Westeros, it was a religion espoused by foreign women. In the former imperial city, now a shadow of its former self and home to a few thousand people, there in the slave market Pope Gregory had seen two blond slave boys and inquired where they were from; told they were Angles, he famously punned Non Angli sed Angeli—not Angles but angels. A mission was sent and in 597 the king of Kent accepted Christianity, under the influence of his Frankish wife Bertha; within a few decades the north had also become Christian, too, largely thanks to Irish monks.
Paganism was eventually crushed, yet the descendants of Horsa and Cerdic had little reason to lament the loss of the old gods, for it was well known that the missionaries had brought with them the written word and with it the lost treasures of Rome. Within a relatively short time Northumbria, once a land of shadows at the very far edge of the world, had emerged into the light, in a flowering of culture that created such beautiful treasures as the Lindisfarne Gospel. The driver of this cultural renaissance was the monastic movement, the real-life maesters who had spread from continental Europe to Britain and formed the first centers of learning in the seven kingdoms.
The English, converted, now sent many missionaries across the cold sea to convert the lands where their ancestors had hailed from. In Frisia, the low-lying land by the banks of the great river Rhine, and in Sax
ony, they achived some success; further north, though, the people still worshipped the old gods. And beyond that, in the bitterly frozen north, there now emerged a terrifying race of people, the real-life Iron Born. Seeing the horror now inflicted on Britain, one monk recalled the terrible prophecy of the Book of Jermiah: “Out of the north an evil shall break forth on all inhabitants of the land.”
*It is also the home of Uhtred in the Last Kingdom book and television series.
15
THE DANCE OF DEATH
Death had lost its terror for Tyrion Lannister, but greyscale was another matter.
—A DANCE WITH DRAGONS
In August 1348, a ball of fire was seen over Paris; large and very bright, the star appeared during the evening in the west. In Italy the previous August, Florentine banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani observed a comet appearing in the Constellation of Taurus, called the Dark Comet or Negra. The comet, which resembled a great fire, was shaped like a sword and stayed in the sky until October.
The Italian Nuova Cronica—New Chronicle—at the time said the comet signified “the death of a powerful king,” and indeed soon enough Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor, died suddenly. The comet was, ominously, sixteen degrees from the head of the Gorgon Medusa represented by the star Algol, which was “widely regarded as the most malevolent star in the sky”, strking terror into many. It was “horrible to look at, like . . . a sword . . . They say the comet is red. . . . It has a hypnotising appearance, with the tail of a dragon.”1 This “Pillar of Fire” was observed over the pope’s home in Avignon too.
Shooting stars were often viewed as portents of ill-news, most famously in 1066 when Halley’s Comet was spotted in the sky, months before the kingdom fell to invaders. And so A Clash of Kings starts with an ominous red asteroid in the sky, interpreted as a good omen by Joffrey and Edmure Tully, but taken as representing war by Aeron Greyjoy and the wildling Osha.
And in this case the comet did indeed herald terrible news. The 1340s had already seen a number of calamities, including earthquakes, storms, famines and floods, but what struck the known world that summer was a horror on a new level.
GREYSCALE
In Martin’s world, a terrifying disease called greyscale afflicts people known as “Stone Men” because the illness causes their skin to become hard and dead. Usually these poor souls have to be exiled and live in the ruins of Old Valyria, where the affliction tends to drive them mad. Occasionally, with the help of the best doctors, or perhaps despite them, someone will survive greyscale, such as poor Shireen Baratheon, Stannis’s daughter, who goes on to live a long and happy life (well, not quite). There was also once a great pestilence called greyplague, “a faster-acting, highly virulent version” of greyscale that in Oldtown killed three-quarters of the population. Lord Quentin Hightower ordered the city quarantined, all shipping was burned, and no one could enter or leave—as a result of which the Reach was saved from the outbreak.
Numerous disgusting diseases existed at the time, but the most obvious comparison to greyscale is leprosy, which was still widespread in fourteenth century Europe—perhaps one in two hundred in England had the illness—although by the following century it was in retreat. Leprosy was recorded as far back as Ancient Egypt, but only became common in Europe after Alexander’s armies brought it back from India. During the early medieval period it became more common, and from the eleventh century laws were passed to keep sufferers away from the population. In 1179, the Third Lateran Council ordered that all lepers should be separated, reflecting the terror this disfiguring disease caused, even among churchmen. It could also take twenty years before the illness showed, which is partly why leprosy caused such panic.
When someone was infected with the disease, they would have a tribunal and be examined by surgeons, and if leprosy was confirmed then a week later they were taken to a church for “the separation,” becoming attendees at their own funerals.
On the day, the unhappy man or woman, dressed in a shroud, was carried to the church on a litter by four priests singing the Catholic song for the dead, Libera me. Inside, the litter was set down at a safe distance from the congregation, and the service of the dead was read, similar to that of a funeral. The leper had to kneel down before the altar dressed in black clothes, where a priest would cast earth on the victim’s feet with a spade and said, “Be thou dead to the World, but alive unto God.”
Afterwards the priest would declare the victim forbidden to enter churches, bakeries or markets, or anywhere people might be found, to always wear leper’s costumes, and to only speak to someone with the wind facing them. Singing the mournful psalm again, the clergy would carry the leper out of the church, through the streets, and out of town to the leper colony. He would be given a pair of castanets to warn others of his approach, a pair of gloves, and a bread basket, and his family would leave him to a sort of living death.
Since lepers were legally dead, all their possessions were given away, although if they were very unlucky—and in times of extreme stress—they might be burned to death. Such was the fear of lepers that, from 1310, barbers were placed at the gates of London to look out for sufferers trying to sneak in (barbers once performed lots of non-hair-related duties, such as surgery, which is why barbershops have red and white poles outside today, to commemorate the sticks patients used to grip during their ordeal).
Lepers had to live in colonies, of which there were two thousand in France at the time and an estimated 250 in England, as of 1230; the cleric Matthew Paris estimated there were nineteeh thousand leprosaria across Europe, although how he came to this figure is anyone’s guess. Leper houses had very harsh conditions and there was even a leper riot, in Kingston, Surrey, in 1313; it was mainly against the futile treatments, which everyone knew didn’t work, among them such outlandish ideas as blood-letting and purging, extreme diets, and eating leeks boiled with adders.
However, medieval attitudes to lepers were complex; although people were horrified and disgusted, and lepers were known as “the walking dead,” many viewed them as being holy, because Jesus had cured sufferers and shown them special affection. This strange mixture of disgust and reverence influenced people’s attitudes to the luckless real Stone Men.
Leprosy could affect all social classes, one of the most prominent being the Crusader leper king of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, who ascended the throne at the age of thirteen in 1174. His teacher William of Tyre, later an archbishop, had discovered Baldwin and his friends one day playing a game in which they tried to injure each other by driving their fingernails into the opponent’s arms; he noticed to his horror that Baldwin felt no pain, a symptom that meant only one thing. After becoming king, Baldwin’s court was especially filled with scheming because everyone thought he would die soon; he would make it to twenty-four. Like Jaime Lannister, Baldwin’s right hand was so badly affected that he learned to fight with his left.
However, by the time of the War of the Roses leprosy had been almost completely driven out of England, one of the reasons being that it was out-competed by other similar diseases from which sufferers developed a cross-immunity, in particular tuberculosis, which remained a menace in Europe until the twentieth century. But it was also because most of Europe’s lepers had been killed by another, far more terrifying disease.
THE GREAT MORTALITY
On June 23, 1348, a ship arrived in the port of Melcombe Regis on the south coast of England, most likely from Calais in northern France. On board among the cargo of that fateful vessel was the deadly y pestis bacterium, either in the rats onboard or infected humans; within a year the realm of England had lost a third of its population to the plague, the disease spreading across the country at a mile a day.
The Arabs called it “The Year of Annihilation.” To Europeans it was the Big Death or Great Mortality, the huge mortalyte in Middle English. Later in the sixteenth century it would become known as the Black Death, a term first used in Sweden in 1555.2 Never had humanity suffered such horrors and afterwards n
othing was the same again—the Church’s power had slipped, the feudal system had gone into terminal decline, and the mindset of Europeans changed forever, now far more morbid.
The continent of Europe, its population thinned by years of famine, had been hit by another cold wet summer in 1335, followed by flooding in 1338 and 1342. There were volcanoes in Italy, earthquakes in Austria, a tidal wave in Cyprus, and a swarm of locusts in Poland. In the 1330s, there were huge upheavals faraway in China, millions dying in earthquakes and droughts. And then came the disease.
The y pestis bacteria that causes the bubonic plague lives on rodents in central Asia, and is usually harmless to humans, but most likely climate change and human population growth allowed it to jump species and become far deadlier. The bacteria in its new deadly form was carried by X cheopis, the rat flea, “an extremely aggressive insect” that “has been known to stick its mouth parts into the skin of a living caterpillar and suck out the caterpillar’s bodily fluids and innards.”3
The disease spread west, brought by trade and warfare, the two sides of the great silk road from east to west. In Genoa’s Crimean colony of Caffa, now Feodosiya, a street brawl between Italian merchants and local Tartars had begun with insults, then punches were thrown, after which knives were taken out and the fight escalated. The Tartars gave an ultimatum to the Italians and an insulting response came back—never a wise response—and so a siege began. However, soon the Tartars were overcome with this unknown disease, dying first in the dozens and then hundreds and thousands. Fatally weakened they withdrew, but before doing so had some corpses put in catapults and, according to contemporary Gabriele de’ Mussis, “lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside.” Soon the disease was raging among the Italians, and the terrified inhabitants of Caffa climbed on board their ships and headed home, first arriving in Messina in Sicily. Only four of the eight Genoan galleys made it back home from the Black Sea—but that was enough to doom Italy.
